


Sans Merci

by icarus_chained



Category: Criminal Minds, Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Cruelty, F/M, Fairy Tales, Insanity, Magic, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-12
Updated: 2012-04-12
Packaged: 2017-11-03 13:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had won her Labyrinth years ago, wrested her child from a faery's grasp. Only too late did she realise what she had sacrificed to do so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sans Merci

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a prompt ficlet

"You know," said the woman in the armchair, conversationally. "I shouldn't believe you're real." She tipped her head back against the chair to smile up at him, distant and amused, and with that old flash of something fierce that he so remembered. "I talk to people that aren't there all the time. Or used to."

Jareth, pale hands resting on the chairback beside her head, looked down at her. At the flickers, pain and guilt and shame and fear, flickering behind the amused defiance in her eyes. He raised a cool eyebrow. "And how do you _know_ they're not there?" he asked, soft and gentle as a blade, and smiled, perhaps a little sadly, as she closed her eyes.

"I never left, did I," Diana Reid said softly. Not a question. Not for him. "All those years. That magic. I never left."

He touched her hair. Gently. Sadly. "We are cruel, the Fae," he murmured softly, to her upturned face, her closed eyes. "Without effort, we are cruel. Some of you survive our touch. Others ... not so well."

She smiled, a faint, fierce little curve of her lip. Other human women he had known, their eyes had been the cruelty. From her, it was her mouth, its motions, and the words she hoarded there. He had ... quite loved her mouth, once upon a time.

"I beat you," she whispered. Looking inward behind bruised eyelids, at some inner landscape, of dreams, and mirrors, and fallen rooms, and the battles she had fought there. "I wrested him back from you. My child. He was not yours to take."

"No," Jareth agreed, softly. Not the child, no. Or not yet. But she didn't need to know that. He did not come to hurt her.

"He walks with monsters, my son," she said, suddenly, opening her eyes. Turning her head to glare at him, fierce, fighting challenge, pride. Her son, Spencer, named for a man who had drafted faeries to serve his own causes. "He walks among them, and slips inside them, and destroys them. He knows how to vanquish them."

He smiled, at that. A grin, something flashing, fierce, cruel, proud. Delighted. He smiled, fey, and all the more when what answered him was not fear, but proud defiance. Jareth smiled, and brushed her hair carefully from her face, the better to see the shining thing in her eyes. "Like his mother, then," he said, both tease and acknowledgement. Gentility, in his way.

"Ha," she snorted, batting at his hand. "No games, Goblin King. I'm too old for that. I lost. I know I lost. I just ... didn't realise until too late." She looked up at him, and smiled, ruefully. Not hatefully. He was surprised, a little. So often, did they hate him, when they realised. "You slipped inside me long ago, didn't you. You won, before I ever left. And I ... didn't realise. Until ... so many years too late." 

Until she had lost her husband. Until she had driven her son to despair in her illness, her madness, the silvered touch of fae across her mind. Until she had looked into the desperate, tormented eyes of her son as they came to take her away, and she had realised the depth of her loss, the magnitude of his victory. Until she had realised ... what she had sacrificed, those long years ago, to win her child from a faery's grasp.

"... Yes," he told her, yet gently. So very gently. "I won, Diana. You hunted, and you fought, and you wrested your child away. But I won, even still." A small, sharp smile, and he let his eyes be haunted, for a moment. He let her, just once, see. Because she was not as other women were, this Diana. She never had been. "It's what I do, dearest. I win."

She looked at him, something distant in her eyes, something soft and knowing. And then she turned, soft around a smile from that so deadly mouth, and rested her cheek against his hand. 

"And lose," she whispered softly, eyes drifting closed. "Every time you win, you lose, don't you? My Goblin King."

And Jareth smiled, sharply, around the clenching in a chest that had never known a heart, where she had slipped inside him in her turn, so many years ago, and leaned down against the first touch of dawn to kiss her forehead, and murmur dreams of faerie magic to guide her sleep.


End file.
